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4,589 words · no email, no account
No. 026 · Technology & Money · Technology
The Lanai Purchase
a biography of Lawrence Joseph Ellison
What the book is
He was born in 1944 to a teenage mother in the Bronx, raised by an aunt and uncle on Chicago's South Side, dropped out of two universities, drifted to California in his early twenties, and founded Software Development Laboratories in 1977 with $1,200 of his own money. Forty-five years later, Oracle is worth half a trillion dollars and Lawrence Joseph Ellison personally owns 98 percent of the Hawaiian island of Lanai.
Sterling Aldridge's biography follows the arc with the same procedural rigour Aldridge brought to his Bloomberg Businessweek work on Silicon Valley founders. The book traces the early IBM-relational-database years, the 1986 Oracle IPO, the 1990 near-collapse and Ray Lane turnaround, the PeopleSoft acquisition fight, the Sun Microsystems purchase, the long rivalry with Bill Gates, the 2014 transition from CEO to chairman/CTO, and the 2012 Lanai purchase for an estimated $300 million.
What emerges is a portrait of a database-software founder whose company's products you have probably never seen and whose products run more of the world's commerce than the work of any other living person.
At a glance
- Subject
- Lawrence Joseph Ellison
- Shelf
- Technology & Money · Technology
- Written by
- Sterling Aldridge
- Chapters
- 18 across 205 pages
- Narrated by
- Miles Ashby
- Editions
- Paperback · EPUB · Audiobook
- Authorisation
- Unauthorised — no subject, estate or label had approval over the text.
Contents · 18 chapters
- 01The Bronx, 1944Read free
- 02California and the Code4,223 words
- 03The CIA and the First Contract3,307 words
- 04The Database Wars3,670 words
- 05The Reckoning3,262 words
- 06The Rivals3,758 words
- 07The Five Wives3,618 words
- 08The Japanese Garden3,062 words
- 09The Island3,498 words
- 10The Cup3,282 words
- 11The Hostile Takeovers3,848 words
- 12The Cloud War3,117 words
- 13The Fortune3,364 words
- 14The Tesla Seat2,708 words
- 15The Media Kingdom3,056 words
- 16Stargate3,356 words
- 17The Mother2,932 words
- 18Power as the Subject2,801 words
The opening chapter is published in full — read it here.
Editions
- Paperback · $19.99
- 6 × 9 in · 205 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback
- EPUB · $3.99
- EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books
ISBN 979-8-90623-061-4 - Audiobook · $5.99
- Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Miles Ashby
ISBN 979-8-90623-206-9
The printed edition has no ISBN registered yet. It affects library and retail listing, not your order.
Questions
01Who is The Lanai Purchase about?
Lawrence Joseph Ellison. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Lanai Purchase — and the name goes on the line underneath.
02Is this an authorised biography?
No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented.
03Can I read some of it before buying?
Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 4,589 words of the book.
04How long is it?
About 60,500 words, 18 chapters, 205 pages in the paperback.
05What is the printed book like?
6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf.
